Lévi-Strauss' Mountain Bike

Many, many years ago I was fortunate enough to study Religions at Lancaster University. Note the plural. That is the key to the department headed by Ninian Smart in the early seventies. One of the courses I took (and thoroughly enjoyed) was baldly titled Myth. Adrian Cunningham, later to be Head of the Department, started the course by encouraging us to analyse Jack and the Beanstalk from a myriad of viewpoints from Marx, through Jung, Freud and Adler to a chap I'd never heard of but who seemed to have a cachet of complexity and obscurity. This was Claude Lévi-Strauss, a structuralist whose view, put very simply, was that human beings perceived the world as a series of polar opposites or binaries. In the example of Jack and the Beanstalk we have many of these: human/giant, rich/poor, subsistence/cash economy, child/adult, foolishness/wisdom, male/female, etc. One of Lévi-Strauss' points was that a society's myths will attempt to mediate between these polarities and that "interesting things" happen when things don't quite fit into a binary. An obvious example is the figure of Jesus in Christianity who is neither Man nor God but blurs these distinctions.

In one of my favourite recipe books * "The Raw and the Cooked" Lévi-Strauss puts forward the view that far from being "primitive", the folk stories that people tell to each other say lots about their cultures and can highlight some very complex relationships. On a very simplistic level Raw/Cooked = Nature/Culture.... smoked salmon and cream cheese anyone?

So there I was on a track this afternoon cycling between Cromer and Northrepps as part of my stay-fit-and-keep-my-heart-healthy regime and having all sorts of childish fun. For most of the track there are two tyre tracked ruts and it's a relatively easy and quick decision to swap tracks if nettles, mud or stones slow you down. In fact it's so easy and quick it's unconscious almost all of the time. Part of the way, over an old railway bridge, there's a middle track too and at one point I had to decide which one of the other two would be a better alternative to the track I was on. I nearly skidded and fell off because it took so long to decide! I did choose a way but it was a close call! Which set me thinking about binaries and polar opposites. If it really is entrenched in our thinking as structural anthropologists seem to think, then it could account for some present and perennial difficulties. Politically we seem divided by left and right, religiously we are believers or atheists, and don't even start on Remain or Brexit. We try to come to terms with a hugely complex interconnected world with mental apparatus more suited to coping in a small village where we know everyone. Following on from my thoughts on evolution and anthropocentrism I just wonder if we need to step back from our thinking about the world and begin to think about our thinking before we make an utter and complete mess of things.

* I went into this wonderful shop about 25 years ago and found "The Raw and the Cooked" on its shelves: booksforcooks.